Grilled Zucchini Pizza

We're still working our way through zucchini this week, so we built dinner around it. Big zukes are perfect for this recipe, so we chose our two biggest, cut them in half lengthwise, and scooped out the seedy centers:

Kirk rubbed olive oil on both sides of the zucchini and lightly salted the cut side. Then he put them out on the grill face down for 3-5 minutes (this part is directly over the coals).

When he flipped them back over, he moved them off to the side so they would be getting indirect (and less) heat. You could stuff these with anything at all, but we thought we'd make them like pizzas. We made one plain (just sauce and mozzarella) for Jonas, and the rest we also covered with roasted red peppers, olives, pepperoni, basil, and parmesan. Kirk put the lid of the grill to let the cheese melt for a couple minutes, and then they were done:

Super easy, and they taste just as good as they look. (The charring around the edges is a good thing!) And I guess it's gluten-free, if you care about that kind of thing.

While Kirk was busy outside at the grill, I made the salad:

This is lettuce (definitely on its way out after the heat wave — this is the last last of it until fall, I think), beet greens, cucumber, and carrots, with nasturtium petals and borage blossoms. The carrots were the whole reason I wanted to have the salad in the first place, since they are perfectly bite-sized. These are "Paris Market" carrots, which grow to be shaped like a radish. Ours are extra-tiny, because the bed where we planted them is now in shade. I probably won't bother with them again, but the novelty in the salad was fun. And we've been out of carrots since early April, so it's nice to have at least a bite of one.

A perfect summer dinner! Easy, fresh, and delicious. Jonas didn't like it (it may have been a mistake to call it pizza, which created an unfulfilled expectation, I think), but the remaining 75 percent of us are planning to have this again throughout the summer.

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